The author of a report critical of climate scientists defended himself against plagiarism charges Tuesday, and denied he was pressured by Republicans to tilt the report.

Offered the chance to further respond to plagiarism allegations, reported Monday in USA TODAY, George Mason University statistician Edward Wegman said in an e-mail that "these attacks are unprecedented in my 42 years as an academic and scholar."

Wegman was the lead author of a 2006 congressional climate science report that has become central in the debate over whether findings of global warming are warranted by scientific evidence.

Three plagiarism experts contacted by the newspaper said excerpts in the Wegman report were likely plagiarized from various sources.

The charges first surfaced on the Deep Climate website in 2009 and later in an analysis by retired computer scientist John Mashey of Portola Valley, Calif.

GMU spokesman Dan Walsch said in an e-mail that the university is investigating the matter.

"I will say that there is a lot of speculation and conspiracy theory in John Mashey's analysis which is simply not true," Wegman said.

"We are not the bad guys. We have never intended that our Congressional testimony was intended to take intellectual credit" for other scholars' work.

Wegman said he and his report co-authors felt "some pressure" from a House committee to complete the report "faster than we might like." But he denied that there was any attempt to tilt the influential climate report politically.

He said the committee "wanted our opinion as to the correctness of the mathematics" used in two climate studies.

BEIJING (AFP) China aims to achieve a peak in its greenhouse gas emissions "at an early date" but insists that developed countries bear the main burden for curbing carbon output, an official said Tuesday.
"We will not allow our emissions to increase unchecked. China is taking decisive actions to slow down our emissions so that our emissions peak can come at an early date," said Xie Zhenhua, China's top climate change official.

However, speaking at a briefing as the world prepares for next week's climate change summit in Mexico, Xie announced no new Chinese proposals for the talks.

無心The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders., Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit__Edward Abbey

They can just send the scientists home and quit pretending that this has anything to do with science. The results have been pre-determined and the next IPCC report will be even worse than the last one.

This new report from the National Research Council concludes that emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels have ushered in a new epoch where human activities will largely determine the evolution of Earth's climate. Because carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is long lived, it can effectively lock the Earth and future generations into a range of impacts, some of which could become very severe. Therefore, emissions reductions choices made today matter in determining impacts experienced not just over the next few decades, but in the coming centuries and millennia.

Last week, I pointed out that the climate story of the decade is that the 2000s are on track to be nearly 0.2°C warmer than the 1990s (see Very warm 2008 makes this the hottest decade in recorded history by far).
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reported today that because humans are altering the climate with greenhouse gas emissions:
The ten warmest years on record have occurred since 1997. Global temperatures for 2000-2008 now stand almost 0.2 °C warmer than the average for the decade 1990-1999.

In a new article published in the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences, a group of scholars from Stanford University, the University of Toronto and elsewhere provide a statistical breakdown of the opinions of the worlds most prominent climate experts. Their conclusion: The group that is skeptical of the evidence of man-made global warming comprises only 2% of the top 50 climate researchers as ranked by expertise (number of climate publications), 3% of researchers in the top 100, and 2.5% of the top 200, excluding researchers present in both groups This result closely agrees with expert surveys, indicating that [about] 97% of self-identified actively publishing climate scientists agree with the tenets of [man-made global warming].

For years, free-market fundamentalists opposed to government regulation have sought to create doubt in the publics mind about the dangers of smoking, acid rain, and ozone depletion. Now they have turned those same tactics on the issue of global warming and on climate scientists, with significant success.

Climate policies that require public sacrifice and limiting economic growth are doomed to failure. To succeed, policies to reduce emissions must promise real benefits and must help make clean energy cheaper.

The fringes of the coldest continent are starting to feel the heat, with the northern Antarctic Peninsula warming faster than virtually any place on Earth. These rapidly rising temperatures represent the first breach in the enormous frozen dome that holds 90 percent of the worlds ice.....

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If present trends in fossil fuel consumption continue... he wrote in Nature, a critical level of warmth will have been passed in high southern latitudes 50 years from now, and deglaciation of West Antarctica will be imminent or in progress... One of the warning signs that a dangerous warming trend is under way in Antarctica will be the breakup of ice shelves on both coasts of the Antarctic Peninsula, starting with the northernmost and extending gradually southward.

無心The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders., Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit__Edward Abbey

If our model results prove to be representative of the real global climate, then climate is actually more sensitive to perturbations by greenhouse gases than current global models predict, and even the highest warming predictions would underestimate the real change we could see.

By email, he said, "there is a lot of speculation and conspiracy theory in John Mashey's analysis which is simply not true." He added, "we have never intended that our Congressional testimony was intended to take intellectual credit for any aspect of paleoclimate reconstruction science or for any original research aspect of social network analysis."

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"Unattributed near-verbatim copying is plagiarism, period, " Mashey says, by email. "In fact, much plagiarism (in the Wegman report) exists not to claim intellectual credit for discovering something, but to claim expertise as a base for making strong statements."

George Mason University has acknowledged that statistics professor Edward Wegman is under investigation for plagiarism. As related in USA Today, the investigation followed a formal complaint by paleoclimatologist Raymond Bradley, co-author of the seminal (and controversial) 1998 and 1999 hockey stick temperature reconstructions.

Global linear trends in the data-rich period between 1960 and 1990 calculated from the WOA94 data are found to be 0.14° ± 0.04°C decade−1 for the temperature class approach and 0.13° ± 0.04°C decade−1 for the 5° bin approach. The corresponding results for the COADS data are 0.10° ± 0.03°C and 0.09° ± 0.03°C decade−1. These trends are not statistically different at the 95% confidence level. Additionally, they agree closely with both SST and landair temperature trends estimated from results reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The similarity between the COADS trends and the trends calculated from the WOA94 dataset provides confirmation of previous SST trend studies, which are based almost exclusively on volunteer observing ship datasets like COADS.

Claims that the ocean has been cooling are correct. Claims that global warming has stopped are not. It is an illogical position: the climate is subject to a lot of natural variability, so the premise that changes should be monotonic temperatures rising in straight lines ignores the fact that nature doesnt work like that. This is why scientists normally discuss trends 30 years or more so that short term fluctuations can be seen as part of a greater pattern. (Other well-known cyclic phenomena like El Nino and La Nina play a part in these complex interactions).

Looking at the trend in ocean heat, this is what we find:

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There are, however, disputes about the accuracy of Argo buoys and expendable measuring devices dropped into the sea, and the reporting of temperatures down to only 700 metres. How do scientists resolve these kind of disputes bearing in mind that such disputes are the very stuff of science, the essence of true scepticism? One way is to find more data sources different ways of measuring the phenomenon in dispute. By using results from seven different teams of scientists, all using different tools and methods, we are able to see a clear trend. And while there is variation between team results due to the differences in technique and measurement methods, one thing they all agree on: long term, temperatures are going up.

無心The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders., Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit__Edward Abbey

Wouldn't it be fun to apply leftist/liberal reasoning to this and point fingers if they don't yield control?

First, I found science that says what I want. If you don't have science that says the opposite then by default you are wrong. If you find science that says the opposite and I don't like the sources you are wrong. If I think the source doesn't love trees or has any agenda other than trees then you are wrong.

Second, give it up and change it now. We have to do this. Things are bad now. They might get better if you give up all your wifi. WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING. Also what's wrong with doing something even if the result is nothing. The world might be a better place anyway. It can't hurt (by my reasoning which doesn't consider human needs or industry or well anything other than control of you) and so you should be forced to do it.

Third, these trees are sick. They were sick before this to some degree but now more of them are sick. By default I blame wifi and thus we don't need any other explanation. My models might be completely wrong. They might need more refinement. My evidence might cause me to have to re-title, rethink and possibly alter entire conclusions and outcomes but it doesn't matter because it is science and your life must thus be under my control. It's different now and that is a good enough rationale for me to control your life.

Please don't resist or be skeptical. That is just proof you are ignorant, evil, a denier and hate the planet.

Send me your laptops and your wireless routers now you evil-doers. Do it now before I make a movie and millions while jetting around pointing my finger at you.

First this isn't science. It was an untested hypothesis. If there was sufficient data to support it, and if it was published, it would be peered reviewed. However the deniers out there might use this to support their claim that science is faulty and we can't believe in AGW. More....

It's an Internet rumor that is spreading, appropriately enough, like wildfire: Wi-Fi signals can make trees and other plants sick, causing cracks in their bark and killing off portions of their leaves.

The outlandish claim, supposedly based on a Dutch study, cropped up late last week and has since been repeated in countless blog posts.
In response, the Dutch government's Antenna Agency, which provides information on the health effects of electromagnetic fields, has issued a statement urging caution on the unpublished, unverified and otherwise very preliminary findings.

MORE DENIERS PSUEDOSCIENCE tm.

無心The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders., Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit__Edward Abbey

It has been suggested that the Arctic really can’t lose all its sea ice during summer because there isn’t enough energy to melt all of the ice in the short summer. There are a couple of reasons why this thinking is faulty.

First, we know the Arctic can potentially lose all its sea ice during summer because it has done so in the past. Examination of several proxy records (e.g., sediment cores) of sea ice indicate ice-free or near ice-free summer conditions for at least some time during the period of 15,000 to 5,000 years ago (Polyak et al., 2010) when Arctic temperatures were not much warmer than today.

Second, the primary evidence provided for the implausibility of ice-free summers is the plot of daily temperature for regions poleward of 80 degrees N from the Danish Meteorological Institute. It shows that temperatures rise only a couple degrees above freezing for a period of about 75 days throughout the entire record since 1958. So there is no warming trend of the surface air temperatures in the high Arctic. So how could one possibly melt ice near the pole with summer temperatures at most a couple degrees above freezing with no increasing trend?

North of 80 degrees, the Arctic has been continuously covered by ice, even during summer, throughout the entire record (except for a small area briefly during summer 2007). As a result, any heat energy in the vicinity will be used to melt ice and will not raise temperatures. Only after the ice melts can the ocean absorb the energy allowing the ocean surface and the air above it to warm significantly. So the summer near-freezing temperatures don’t say anything much about the energy available to melt ice, only that ice is melting. (I’ll note that it is possible to have higher air temperatures locally, for example due to a weather system bringing in warm air from the south, but the average over the entire region will stay near freezing).

However, there are still only ~75 days of melt, which isn’t much time. But one needs to think about the overall process of what happens in the Arctic, not simply the direct solar energy. As temperatures increase, summer extent decreases, which allows more absorption of solar energy. This melts more ice, decreasing the extent and thinning the ice. Heat absorbed in the ocean away from the ice edge will warm the ocean waters, which will delay freeze-up in the fall. This leads to less ice growth further thinning of the ice. With warmer temperatures, melt will begin earlier in the spring and freeze-up will start later in the fall (as has been observed, e.g., Markus et al. [2009], Serreze et al. [2009], Stroeve et al. [2006]). This is a positive feedback (the sea ice-albedo feedback). Under this feedback, the ice will eventually become thin enough to melt completely most everywhere in the Arctic during a single summer.

There is little doubt in the sea ice community that during summer the Arctic can become ice-free and will become ice-free as temperatures continue to rise.

..Recent research, including the examination of ice cores and growth rings of ancient trees, shows that the Northern Hemisphere has been warmer since 1980 than at any other time during the last 2000 years. The observed increase in temperature under climate change was generally higher in northern than in southern European seas....

While on-going national and international actions to curtail and reduce greenhouse gas emissions are essential, the levels of greenhouse gases currently in the atmosphere, and their impact, are likely to persist for several decades. On-going and increased efforts to mitigate climate change through reduction in greenhouse gases are therefore crucial.

In parallel, a better understanding of potential climate change impacts (scenarios) at both regional and local levels, the development of improved methods to quantify the uncertainty of climate change projections, the construction of usable climate change indicators, and an improvement of the interface between science and policy formulation in terms of risk assessment will be essential to formulate and inform better adaptive strategies to address the inevitable consequences of climate change......

無心The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders., Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit__Edward Abbey

How about from the scientists themselves, unfiltered by media or ideologues? Below, find excerpts from the statements of pretty much every single respected, serious, professional scientific society in the world. Go to their websites. All of this stuff is easily available, if you are willing to look. Don't take my word for it.

There is no good argument against global warming. In all the brouhaha about tiny errors recently found in the massive IPCC report, the posturing by global climate deniers, including some elected officials, leaked emails, and media reports, here is one fact that seems to have been overlooked:
Those who deny that humans are causing unprecedented climate change have never, ever produced an alternative scientific argument that comes close to explaining the evidence we see around the world that the climate is changing.

無心The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders., Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit__Edward Abbey

WASHINGTON A first-of-its-kind NASA study is finding nice cool lakes are heating up even faster than air.

Two NASA scientists used satellite data to look at 104 large inland lakes around the world and found that on average they have warmed 2 degrees (1.1 degree Celsius) since 1985. That's about two-and-a-half times the increase in global temperatures in the same time period.

Russia's Lake Ladoga and America's Lake Tahoe are warming significantly and the most, said study co-author Simon Hook, a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Calif. Tahoe has heated up by 3 degrees (1.7 degrees Celsius) since 1985, while Ladoga has been even hotter, going up by 4 degrees (2.2 degrees Celsius).

The study was published Wednesday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters....

無心The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders., Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit__Edward Abbey

Im sure the Danish statistician would appreciate Box Office Mojo quantitative detail, but you dont need to know much statistics to realize that not bloody many people are actually watching this movie.

In fact, the movie is just a clever loss leader for Lomborgs bad ideas.* A film is a ticket to widespread media attention, far more than even a new book provides.* For instance, the movie means that credulous reviewers who dont follow the energy and climate debate closely will write columns that millions will read (see Cool It and plausible deniability), compared to the, uhh, hundreds that are flocking to the film.

Lomborg cherry-picks data to present skewed view of how we should combat global warming

A new documentary on climate change recently opened up in theaters. Titled Cool It, it features a Danish political scientist, Bjørn Lomborg, who has stirred up controversy in the past by questioning the urgency of addressing the problem.

The good news about Cool It is that it doesn't dispute the reality of climate change. Lomborg accepts the overwhelming scientific evidence that burning coal and oil and destroying forests has overloaded the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, trapping heat that would otherwise escape into space, thus warming the planet and disrupting the climate.

Instead, the film argues against fearing climate change. It opens with animations and voice-overs from schoolchildren talking about climate change, including a child worrying that the Earth is getting very, very, very, very, very, very hot.

無心The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders., Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit__Edward Abbey

One year after the near-collapse of climate talks in Copenhagen, participants will be hard-pressed to map a viable path forward. Global climate negotiations began in 1992 at the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and led to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, in which industrialized countries agreed to curb their emissions. But the protocol was intended as a first step, and countries have been struggling to agree on a follow-up treaty ever since. Jairam Ramesh, India's environment minister, says that Cancún is the "last chance" for such talks.

Given China's continued opposition to a hard target for cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions, and the failure of the United States to pass climate legislation, there is virtually no hope of a binding global emissions treaty at the Cancún meeting, which will run from 29 November to 10 December.

無心The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders., Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit__Edward Abbey

The overall warming of the earth's northern half could result in cold winters. The shrinking of sea-ice in the eastern Arctic causes some regional heating of the lower levels of air which may lead to strong anomalies in atmospheric airstreams, triggering an overall cooling of the northern continents, a study recently published in the Journal of Geophysical Research shows. These anomalies could triple the probability of cold winter extremes in Europe and northern Asia, says Vladimir Petoukhov, lead author of the study and climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. Recent severe winters like last years or the one of 2005-06 do not conflict with the global warming picture, but rather supplement it.

Current state-of-the-art global climate models predict substantial warming in response to increases in greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. The models, though, disagree widely in the magnitude of the warming we can expect. The disagreement among models is mainly due to the different representation of clouds. Some models predict that global mean cloud cover will increase in a warmer climate and the increased reflection of solar radiation will limit the predicted global warming. Other models predict reduced cloudiness and magnified warming. In a paper that has just appeared in the Journal of Climate, researchers from the University of Hawaii Manoa (UHM) have assessed the performance of current global models in simulating clouds and have presented a new approach to determining the expected cloud feedbacks in a warmer climate.

無心The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders., Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit__Edward Abbey

Compared to the mean projected rise of 1°C, such differences are fairly large and can have a pronounced impact on tropical and subtropical climate by altering atmospheric heating patterns and therefore rainfall, explains Xie. Our results broadly indicate that regions of peak sea surface temperature will get wetter, and those relatively cool will get drier.

According to a new study by researchers at the International Pacific Research Center (IPRC) of the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM), this threshold sea surface temperature for convection is rising under global warming at the same rate as that of the tropical oceans. Their paper appears in the Advance Online Publications of Nature Geoscience.

無心The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders., Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit__Edward Abbey

ScienceDaily (May 4, 2010) Trees and other plants help keep the planet cool, but rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are turning down this global air conditioner. According to a new study by researchers at the Carnegie Institution for Science, in some regions more than a quarter of the warming from increased carbon dioxide is due to its direct impact on vegetation.
Map of globe shows percentage of predicted warming due to the direct effect of carbon dioxide on plants. Carbon dioxide warms the Earth because it is a greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, but it also causes plants to provide less evaporative cooling. A study by Long Cao and Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science finds that in some places (darkest orange) over 25 percent of the warming from increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is a result of decreased evaporative cooling by plants. (Credit: Carnegie Institution)

Researchers found that plants lose the ability to take up so much nitrate the most common form of nitrogen in agricultural soils and convert it into organic compounds, such as proteins, when growing in CO2-enriched environments.

The problem is that "most crop plants ... use nitrate as their main form of nitrogen," said Arnold Bloom, lead author of the study published in Science last week (14 May) and a researcher at the US-based University of California, Davis. Increasing the levels of CO2 leads to "nitrogen starved" crops that contain less protein for human consumption, he said.

Spring wheat (Triticum aestivum L. cv. TRISO) was grown for three consecutive seasons in a free-air carbon dioxide (CO2) enrichment (FACE) field experiment in order to examine the effects on crop yield and grain quality. CO2 enrichment promoted aboveground biomass (+11.8%) and grain yield (+10.4%). However, adverse effects were predominantly observed on wholegrain quality characteristics. Although the thousand-grain weight remained unchanged, size distribution was significantly shifted towards smaller grains, which may directly relate to lower market value. Total grain protein concentration decreased significantly by 7.4% under elevated CO2, and protein and amino acid composition were altered. Corresponding to the decline in grain protein concentration, CO2 enrichment resulted in an overall decrease in amino acid concentrations, with greater reductions in non-essential than essential amino acids. Minerals such as potassium, molybdenum and lead increased, while manganese, iron, cadmium and silicon decreased, suggesting that adjustments of agricultural practices may be required to retain current grain quality standards.

MORE SPAM FOR tm and jg

無心The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders., Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit__Edward Abbey

We know from simple on-the-ground knowledge that the 2010 drought was extreme, leading to record lows on some major rivers in the Amazon region and an upsurge in the number of forest fires. Preliminary analyses suggest that the 2010 drought was more widespread and severe than the 2005 event. The 2005 drought was identified as a 1-in-100 year type event.

Up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state, not necessarily producing gradual changes between the current and the future situation.

On January 25th, North published a post on his blog in which he dredged up one suspicious-looking claim made by the IPCC. On page 596, the second Working Group report had stated that 40% of the Amazon forests could react drastically to even a slight change in precipitation, potentially being replaced by ecosystems that have more resistance to multiple stresses caused by temperature increase, droughts and fires, such as tropical savannas. Again, the reference given was to a WWF report in this case a Global Review of Forest Fires by a policy analyst, Dr PF Moore, and a journalist and campaigner, Andy Rowell. Apparently unable to find the information given by the IPCC in WWFs report, North*wrote:
The assertions attributed to them, that up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation is nowhere to be found in their report. Nor elsewhere can we find any other reference to 40 percent of the Amazon being affected by even slight reductions in precipitation.
Yet the fourteenth page of WWFs report had stated exactly that. Up to 40% of the Brazilian forest is extremely sensitive to small reductions in the amount of rainfall, the report noted.

OK

無心The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders., Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit__Edward Abbey

The first global study into the effects of passive smoking has found it causes 600,000 deaths every year.
One-third of those killed are children, often exposed to smoke at home, the World Health Organization (WHO) found.
The study, in 192 countries, found that passive smoking is particularly dangerous for children, said to be at higher risk of sudden infant death syndrome, pneumonia and asthma.

無心The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders., Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit__Edward Abbey

Claims that global warming has slowed down over the past decade were partly based on faulty data. Instead, the rate of global warming was underestimated because of a new way of measuring sea-surface temperatures, suggests a new study.

[Lead author John] Kennedy says the underestimation of the change in sea-surface temperature could account for up to 0.03*°C of the apparent slowdown in global temperatures. The correction could mean that 2010 will be the warmest year on record, surpassing 1998 and 2005.

無心The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders., Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit__Edward Abbey

Projections of global warming relative to pre-industrial for the A1FI emissions scenario the one were currently on. Dark shading shows the mean ±1*s.d. [standard deviation] for the tunings to 19 AR4 GCMs [IPCC Fourth Assessment General Circulation Models]* and the light shading shows the change in the uncertainty range when climatecarbon-cycle feedbacks are included.

One of the greatest failings of the climate science community (and the media) is not spelling out as clearly as possible the risks we face on our current emissions path, as well as the plausible worst-case scenario, which includes massive ecosystem collapse. So much of what the public and policymakers think is coming is a combination of

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1. The low end of the expected range of warming and impacts based on aggressive policies to reduce emissions (and no serious carbon-cycle feedbacks)

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2. Analyses of a few selected impacts, but not an integrated examination of multiple impacts

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3. Disinformation pushed by the anti-science, pro-pollution crowd

無心The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders., Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit__Edward Abbey

This paper presents simulations of climate change with an ensemble of GCMs driven by the A1FI scenario, and also assesses the implications of carbon-cycle feedbacks for the climate-change projections. Using these GCM projections along with simple climate-model projections, including uncertainties in carbon-cycle feedbacks, and also comparing against other model projections from the IPCC, our best estimate is that the A1FI emissions scenario would lead to a warming of 4°C relative to pre-industrial during the 2070s. If carbon-cycle feedbacks are stronger, which appears less likely but still credible, then 4°C warming could be reached by the early 2060s in projections that are consistent with the IPCCs likely range.

無心The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders., Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit__Edward Abbey

Methane release from the not-so-perma-frost is the most dangerous amplifying feedback in the entire carbon cycle. Research published in Fridays journal Science finds a key lid on the large sub-sea permafrost carbon reservoir near Eastern Siberia is clearly perforated, and sedimentary CH4 [methane] is escaping to the atmosphere.

The permafrost of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (an area of about 2 million kilometers squared) is more porous than previously thought. The ocean on top of it and the heat from the mantle below it warm it and make it perforated like Swiss cheese. This allows methane gas stored under it under pressure to burst into the atmosphere. The amount leaking from this locale is comparable to all the methane from the rest of the world's oceans put together. Methane is a greenhouse gas more than 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

無心The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders., Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit__Edward Abbey

“We're not scientifically there yet. Despite what you may have heard in the media, there is nothing like a consensus of scientific opinion that this is a problem. Because there is natural variability in the weather, you cannot statistically know for another 150 years.” -- UN IPCC's Tom Tripp, a member of the UN IPCC since 2004 and listed as one of the lead authors and serves as the Director of Technical Services & Development for U.S. Magnesium.

“Any reasonable scientific analysis must conclude the basic theory wrong!!” -- NASA Scientist Dr. Leonard Weinstein who worked 35 years at the NASA Langley Research Center and finished his career there as a Senior Research Scientist. Weinstein, is presently a Senior Research Fellow at the National Institute of Aerospace.

“Please remain calm: The Earth will heal itself -- Climate is beyond our power to control...Earth doesn't care about governments or their legislation. You can't find much actual global warming in present-day weather observations. Climate change is a matter of geologic time, something that the earth routinely does on its own without asking anyone's permission or explaining itself.” -- Nobel Prize-Winning Stanford University Physicist Dr. Robert B. Laughlin, who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1998, and was formerly a research scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

“In essence, the jig is up. The whole thing is a fraud. And even the fraudsters that fudged data are admitting to temperature history that they used to say didn't happen...Perhaps what has doomed the Climategate fraudsters the most was their brazenness in fudging the data” -- Dr. Christopher J. Kobus, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Oakland University, specializes in alternative energy, thermal transport phenomena, two-phase flow and fluid and thermal energy systems.

“The energy mankind generates is so small compared to that overall energy budget that it simply cannot affect the climate...The planet's climate is doing its own thing, but we cannot pinpoint significant trends in changes to it because it dates back millions of years while the study of it began only recently. We are children of the Sun; we simply lack data to draw the proper conclusions.” -- Russian Scientist Dr. Anatoly Levitin, the head of geomagnetic variations laboratory at the Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism, Ionosphere and Radiowave Propagation of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

“Hundreds of billion dollars have been wasted with the attempt of imposing a Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory that is not supported by physical world evidences...AGW has been forcefully imposed by means of a barrage of scare stories and indoctrination that begins in the elementary school textbooks.” -- Brazilian Geologist Geraldo LuÃ*s Lino, who authored the 2009 book “The Global Warming Fraud: How a Natural Phenomenon Was Converted into a False World Emergency.”

"I am an environmentalist,” but “I must disagree with Mr. Gore” -- Chemistry Professor Dr. Mary Mumper, the chair of the Chemistry Department at Frostburg State University in Maryland, during her presentation titled “Anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide and Global Warming, the Skeptic's View.”

“I am ashamed of what climate science has become today,” The science “community is relying on an inadequate model to blame CO2 and innocent citizens for global warming in order to generate funding and to gain attention. If this is what 'science' has become today, I, as a scientist, am ashamed...Science is too important for our society to be misused in the way it has been done within the Climate Science Community.” -- Swedish Climatologist Dr. Hans Jelbring,

“Those who call themselves 'Green planet advocates' should be arguing for a CO2- fertilized atmosphere, not a CO2-starved atmosphere...Diversity increases when the planet was warm AND had high CO2 atmospheric content...Al Gore's personal behavior supports a green planet - his enormous energy use with his 4 homes and his bizjet, does indeed help make the planet greener. Kudos, Al for doing your part to save the planet.” -- Renowned engineer and aviation/space pioneer Burt Rutan, who was named "100 most influential people in the world, 2004" by Time Magazine and Newsweek called him "the man responsible for more innovations in modern aviation than any living engineer."

“Global warming is the central tenet of this new belief system in much the same way that the Resurrection is the central tenet of Christianity. Al Gore has taken a role corresponding to that of St Paul in proselytizing the new faith...My skepticism about AGW arises from the fact that as a physicist who has worked in closely related areas, I know how poor the underlying science is. In effect the scientific method has been abandoned in this field.” -- Atmospheric Physicist Dr. John Reid, who worked with Australia's CSIRO's (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization) Division of Oceanography and worked in surface gravity waves (ocean waves) research.

“We maintain there is no reason whatsoever to worry about man-made climate change, because there is no evidence whatsoever that such a thing is happening.” -- Greek Earth scientists Antonis Christofides and Nikos Mamassis of the National Technical University of Athens' Department of Water Resources and Environmental Engineering.

“There are clear cycles during which both temperature and salinity rise and fall. These cycles are related to solar activity...In my opinion and that of our institute, the problems connected to the current stage of warming are being exaggerated. What we are dealing with is not a global warming of the atmosphere or of the oceans.” -- Biologist Pavel Makarevich of the Biological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences

“Because the greenhouse effect is temporary rather than permanent, predictions of significant global warming in the 21st century by IPCC are not supported by the data.” -- Hebrew University Professor Dr. Michael Beenstock an honorary fellow with Institute for Economic Affairs who published a study challenging man-made global warming claims titled “Polynomial Cointegration Tests of the Anthropogenic Theory of Global Warming.”

“The whole idea of anthropogenic global warming is completely unfounded. There appears to have been money gained by Michael Mann, Al Gore and UN IPCC's Rajendra Pachauri as a consequence of this deception, so it's fraud.” -- South African astrophysicist Hilton Ratcliffe, a member of the Astronomical Society of Southern Africa (ASSA) and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and a Fellow of the British Institute of Physics.